A wide variety of printing technology is now available and widely used to print high quality color images, such as photographs and commercial printings. Such high quality color images may be printed using a variety of printing technology, including inkjet and laser jet printing technology. In order to improve printing capacity and productivity, multiple printers may be used for a single print job. Similarly, multiple print engines or printheads may be employed in a single printing device. This can provide a cost-efficient way to increase printing performance.
There can be printing consistency problems, however, with increasing productivity in this way. Due to inherent printer calibration errors, the colors printed by different printers, different print engines, or different printhead may exhibit visible hue shift. Consequently, when a series of print images, or a single “print job”, with similar scenes are printed using multiple printers or using multiple printheads in a multiple printhead arrangement, the same input colors may be output by different engines or printheads thereby looking noticeably different.
Various calibration techniques may be employed so that visible hue shift can be minimized or at least reduced to some extent. However, it is very difficult to eliminate the hue shift problem completely, and such calibration techniques tend to be quite complex and use a considerable amount of system resources.
For these and other reasons, a need exists for the present invention.